I’m finally back in the home office after running around Europe for a month. Let’s talk through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.

Here’s what we covered:

• 00:00 Start
• 01:52 World Peace: Hey Brent, I am working in AZURE currently and the AZURE architect is placing all the mdf and ldf files on one drive and indicating it as a much better setup in AZURE then setting up a data drive and log drive. Are the previous ways of creating a DB server no longer valid.
• 03:59 Bishal: I have Azure VM hosting SQL standard edition with multiple DBs. We reduce server specs during weekend & upgrade back on Monday to save costs as there would be very little usage during weekend but this has downtime of around 10 mins. Is there any option for this with 0 downtime?
• 05:07 Kurama: My boss says you do not need to run index maintenance anymore outside of stats updates as fragmentation is not a concern anymore with all flash storage. We haven’t had any issues with it being used in this case (main db is 10tb~ with many billion row tables) What do you think?
• 05:31 SQLHeinrich: Hi Brent, I didn’t have the budget for Data Saturday Croatia this year. How was it from your perspective? How is the SQL Server community there? And do you plan on being there next year too?
• 07:19 So very tired: Neither transactional nor merge replication are in my toolbox. Do they take long to learn? Are they worth learning?
• 08:19 Flash Sentry: Very specifically for AGs, what should I look for in a monitoring tool? Most of them just regurgitate sys.dm_hadr_database_replica_states.
• 09:49 Tigger: What model and size do you use in your Local LLM?
• 12:06 Jerry: Hey Brent! Could you explain data partitioning in SQL Server to someone new to it? When should we consider it, and what are the main things to watch out for?
• 13:09 MyTeaGotCold: Have you found a use case for incremental statistics? As far as I can tell, nothing has changed since Erin Stellato was complaining about them in SQL Server 2014.
• 13:25 marcus-the-german: Hi Brent, I have a simple select * from table, no filtering. The query runs for 8 sec (statistics io, time is on), but execution plan says just 900 ms. Any hints? The query is executed in SSMS 21.
• 14:00 Dopinder: What’s the max DB’s you recommend for a single SQL availability group? What are the warnings for exceeding this number?
• 15:17 Mirza: What is the technology in Azure that you recommend we focus on if we only had on premises experience as a DBA. Is it just Azure SQL database or do we need to have a working knowledge of other tools such as Azure data factory?
• 15:56 OneCTEtoRuleThemAll: To CTE or not to CTE? Help me be kind to myself and others – other than recursion, are CTEs only a matter of preference and style? Or can you gain performance under the hood using them?